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A quarterly publication of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies and Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture

Gazeta Volume 26, No. 2 Summer 2019

The planned memorial site of the Great Synagogue in Oświęcim. Courtesy of Maciek Zabierowski.

CONTENTS Message from Irene Pipes ............................................................................................... 2Message from Tad Taube and Shana Penn ................................................................... 3

FEATURESSarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement Naomi Seidman ..................................................................................................................... 4On Yiddish Poetry, Language, and “the Female Experience of the World”: Zofia Zalewska Interviews Karolina Szymaniak on the New Anthology My Wild Goat .................... 7

REPORTSPOLIN Museum Awaits the Return of its Director, Professor Dariusz Stola Reported by Gazeta Editorial Team ....................................................................................... 10 Jewish Cemetery in Tarnów Rededicated, Restored, and Vandalized ...................... 11The Time Has Come: Change Krakόw’s Jewish Communal Structure Rabbis Eliezer Gurary and Avi Baumol ................................................................................... 13Anti-Semitic Event in Pruchnik Causes Alarm Fay and Julian Bussgang ..................................................................................................... 16Reflections of a Lucky Jew Adam Schorin ..................................................................................................................... 18

ANNOUNCEMENTSBOOKSKol Ishe: The Voice of Women in Yiddish Poetry By Joanna Lisek Reviewed by Mikhail Krutikov ........................................................................................... 21The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz By Jack Fairweather Reviewed by Fay and Julian Bussgang ............................................................................ 23

CONFERENCESPoland and the Jews at the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center ... 24Conference Devoted to Lithuanian-Jewish Writer Grigory Kanovich Antony Polonsky ............................................................................................................. 25Conference of the Polish Association of Yiddish Studies Adam Stepnowski ........................................................................................................... 26

Editorial & Design: Tressa Berman, Fay Bussgang, Julian Bussgang, Shana Penn, Antony Polonsky, Adam Schorin, Agnieszka Ilwicka, William Zeisel, LaserCom Design.

GAZETA SUMMER 2019 n 1

EXHIBITIONExpressions of Freedom at the Museum of the City of Łódź ................................. 27

AWARDS AND UPDATES2019 Irena Sendler Award Recipients ...................................................................... 29POLIN Museum to Host Azrieli Prizes for Jewish Music ........................................ 30GEOP and POLIN Announcements ........................................................................ 31

EVENTS 75th Anniversary Commemoration Marks Liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto ......................................................................................................... 34Memoir Buried Rivers to be Presented at 75th Anniversary Commemoration in Łódź ........................................................................................... 35Jewish Festival in Łódź during Shavuot ................................................................... 36 The Name’s Bajgelman—World Premiere at the Jewish Culture Festival ............ 37Third Edition of FestivALT Focuses on Women and Agency ................................. 39The Sixth Annual Ride for the Living ........................................................................ 40Teachers in Oświęcim Learn about Anti-Semitism Maciek Zabierowski ........................................................................................................ 41The Great Synagogue Memorial Park in Oświęcim Maciek Zabierowski ........................................................................................................ 42

PHOTO ESSAYJews March in Warsaw Pride Parade ............................................................................ 44

2 n GAZETA VOLUME 26, NO. 2

Message from Irene Pipes

President, American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies

Founder of Gazeta

Dear Friends,

In May and June I made a trip to Poland, Israel, and the United Kingdom. In Poland, I met Dariusz Stola, who had just won the competition for the directorship of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. We very much hope that Piotr Gliński, Minister of Culture and National Heritage, will soon ratify his appointment.

Volume 32 of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, which has as its theme “Jewish Musicians and Jewish Music-Making on the Polish Lands,” is now at the printers and should appear in November. On a visit to London, I met with Antony Polonsky, Chief Historian of POLIN Museum, and François Guesnet, Reader in Jewish History at University College London, joint chairs of the editorial collegium of Polin. We discussed future issues of the journal and the activities of the London-based Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies, our sister organization. While in London, I also attended a conference devoted to the life and works of Lithuanian-Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich, which was held at the New London Synagogue to commemorate his ninetieth birthday, described elsewhere in this issue.

Wishing you all a restful and enjoyable summer,

Irene PipesPresident

Irene Pipes


Chairman and Executive Director, Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture

Message from Tad Taube and Shana Penn

Jews have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to change while preserving their essential traditions and values. This issue of Gazeta offers instructive instances of how to sustain or even assert identity in times of challenging transformation.

We can see this clearly in the lead article, about an Orthodox woman in Krakόw in 1917, a time when women around the world were claiming their full rights as citizens and were challenging traditions, including Orthodox Judaism. The woman, Sarah Schenirer, began a revolution in the education of Jewish girls, not by storming the bastions of the establishment but by claiming to protect traditional Orthodox values. As our author Naomi Seidman explains, the plan worked, and today Jewish girls have the option of attending one of the thousands of Bais Yaakov schools operating in thirteen countries.

Other articles in this issue explore moments when societal change and Jewish tradition collide. Our Assistant Editor, Adam Schorin, writes about cultural stereotypes at the Easter market in today’s Krakόw, while elsewhere we learn about the first women poets writing in Yiddish, or the revolutionary platform of a Polish Jewish performance and artistic group in 1919 that sought to create a new model of art inspired by folk art and Hasidic tradition.

We hope that as you read this issue of Gazeta, you will share our satisfaction in discovering more about the ways in which Jews, of all eras and cultures, including our own, have confronted the challenge of maintaining a unique heritage and identity in a world that insists on being constantly transformed.

Tad Taube and Shana Penn Chairman and Executive Director

Tad Taube

Shana Penn


FEATURE ARTICLE

Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019

Author’s Note:

The following is an excerpt from my book Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name

of Tradition. Bais Yaakov is an international network of schools and youth movements for Orthodox girls, founded in Kraków in 1917 by Sarah Schenirer, a divorced seamstress with an eighth-grade education. Schenirer founded her school in part to address a crisis of girls’ defection from Orthodoxy, hoping to stem this tide by providing girls with an education in Jewish sources—an education previously restricted to boys. While Orthodox parents were increasingly inclined to tighten restrictions on girls in an attempt to combat the epidemic of defections, Schenirer removed girls from their home environments and accorded them new freedoms and responsibilities, creating cohorts of adolescent girls who traveled Poland to summer colonies where they learned Torah under the trees in preparation for founding new schools in small towns. Within twenty years, the school had grown to more than two hundred locations in Poland, and the traditionalist revolution had spread beyond Poland to Central and Western Europe, North America, and British Mandate Palestine. It thrives in thirteen countries today, with two major centers in Israel and North America.

Far more than a school system, at its interwar height Bais Yaakov constituted a ramified Orthodox girls’ youth culture, with a dedicated press, a monthly literary journal, summer camps, three teachers’ seminaries, a chain of vocational institutions, libraries and clubhouses, clothing and school supply collectives, speakers’ bureaus, movement songs, and distinctive holidays and celebrations. This excerpt, from Chapter 5 of my book, describes the connections between Bais Yaakov and Hasidism, but the movement was also heavily influenced by the youth culture of interwar Poland. While the movement claimed only to be combatting this culture, it also drew from it, and Bais Yaakov, shot through with feminist, Zionist, and socialist elements, was itself a youth movement competing in a field of attractive rivals.

Naomi Seidman

Sara Schenirer ID card. Courtesy of the author.


Sara Schenirer (1883–1935) borrowed from Hasidic practices to produce a female counterpart to the Hasidic world that did not overstep the strict separation of men and women. Rather than bringing men back home to the sabbath table or allowing women into the Hasidic court, Bais Yaakov aimed to recreate a version of the intense, all-male environment of a Hasidic court for young women. This was most obvious in the seminaries, where the girls not only studied together, but also spent sabbaths (and some holidays) singing, sharing meals, and praying. While these holidays would traditionally have been observed in the home or a sexually segregated synagogue, where women were not permitted to sing, Bais Yaakov enabled girls and women to recreate, within a female world, the religious experience from which they had been excluded.

We do not intend to describe the events by reading history backward. We have tried not to read the story from its endpoint but rather as much as possible from the perspective of the historical actors. As is

clear from her diary, Schenirer loved to travel, and her description of the Hasidic pilgrimage to the rebbe’s court dwells nearly as enviously on the rail journey, among the streams of Hasidim all sharing the experience of heading to the same place, as on the time spent in the rebbe’s presence. Individual pilgrimages to Hasidic courts were not entirely unknown among Bais Yaakov teachers and students: Judith Grunfeld-Rosenbaum, after her first summer in the teacher-training course, visited the court of the Gerer Rebbe and shortly after that travelled with Sarah Schenirer to the court of Bobov, to enquire about the Bobover Rebbe’s opposition to Bais Yaakov. Chava Weinberg Pincus, the first American student at the Kraków seminary, travelled to the Gerer court with the German-educated teacher Esther Hamburger for Rosh-

Hashannah (it is no accident that these women, Sarah Schenirer was no exception, were outsiders to the Hasidic world; such outsiders, according to Wodziński, were often more welcome at the court than the daughters or wives of Hasidim). The more direct appropriation of Hasidic pilgrimage practices in Bais Yaakov was not to Hasidic courts but rather to the graves of deceased rabbis. In the yom kippur katan ritual that Sarah Schenirer initiated, after praying in Rabbi Moses Isserles’s famed synagogue, she and her students would enter the adjacent cemetery to recite psalms at his grave and at the graves of the other great rabbis and sages. Naftali Loewenthal sees “a touch of inspiration” in her transformation of yom kippur katan, traditionally observed by fasting, into an occasion for pilgrimage and grave-visiting, thereby opening “a path of spiritual encounter insulated from the grief of mourning.” Perhaps the more revealing comparison is not the kabbalistic versus Bais Yaakov understanding of the new-moon ritual, but rather male pilgrimage to Hasidic courts versus female

Bais Yaakov enabled girls

and women to recreate,

within a female world,

the religious experience

from which they had

been excluded.


pilgrimage to rabbinic graves. If group travel to living rabbis was ruled out, deceased ones might be more open to visits by young women; in any case, they could hardly protest. And surely this should be accompanied by joy, not fasting. It is true that male Hasidim also travelled in groups to gravesites, and that cemetery rituals and practices were particularly fertile ground for Ashkenazi women’s spirituality. Sarah Schenirer innovated, however, in finding collective female expression for these practices, creating occasions for groups of young women to walk the streets of Kraków, hike the steep slopes of Polish mountains, and take trains together throughout the country. While there is, in traditional Judaism, a religious framework for a collective of males (in forming a quorum for prayer, for example), she gave meaning to a female collective. This was an innovation she proved happy to display in public: in pilgrimage rituals that took large groups of young women down city streets, Bais Yaakov displayed women’s religious devotion for all the world to see, shielding itself from

criticism by the sincerity and enthusiasm of this devotion.

That Bais Yaakov was somehow Hasidic was a common observation. Less frequently uttered was the corollary, that Sarah Schenirer functioned as a Hasidic rabbi. A Polish Jewish periodical in Kraków reporting on her funeral noted that she “was an active woman in the public sphere … well respected in the Agudah, and among the Agudah schools, venerated almost religiously.” The correspondent described the funeral, in which “crowds of thousands of Orthodox Jews accompanied this pious and learned woman to the place of her eternal rest,” as evidence that she was honored “in a way that is usually reserved only for distinguished Hasidic rabbis and great rabbis.”

Schenirer reshaped for Hasidic women those pilgrimages and rituals that had previously been associated with exclusively male adepts. By establishing Bais Yaakov schools, she laid the foundation for women’s religious education. By 1939, there more than 200 Bais Yaakov schools with over 40,000 students. Today,

schools and institutes that bear her name can be found throughout the world. n

Naomi Seidman, PhD, is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto.


Interview On Yiddish Poetry, Language, and “the Female Experience of the World”Zofia Zalewska Interviews Karolina Szymaniak on the New Anthology My Wild Goat

ZOFIA ZALESKA: In Poland, Yiddish literature is usually perceived as folklore or a testimony of a world that no longer exists. In the anthology My Wild Goat, which you have prepared together with Joanna Lisek and Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota, you demonstrate that Yiddish literature is in fact multi-layered and diverse. And also that it has a female lineage.

KAROLINA SZYMANIAK: Over the centuries, Yiddish was considered a language of women. Traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture was bilingual: Yiddish was the everyday language of the whole community, and Hebrew and Aramaic—usually referred to as loshn koydesh, the holy language—were used in everything that concerned the sphere of the sacred. Hebrew was also the language of communication between Jewish communities, and it was used for writing important, formal documents.

Hebrew was the language of the scriptures and sacred books, and the duty of religious education was only mandatory for men. This does not mean that there were no women who were well educated in religious matters, but for the most part women did not know Hebrew—they spoke and prayed in Yiddish. Yiddish books were addressed primarily to them. Yiddish was considered a language of illiteracy and femininity.

Karolina Szymaniak. Photograph by Cezary Gwóźdź. Used with permission.

Traditional Ashkenazi

Jewish culture was

bilingual: Yiddish was

the everyday language

of the whole community,

and Hebrew and Aramaic

were used in everything

that concerned the

sphere of the sacred.


ZOFIA ZALESKA: In the anthology My Wild Goat, you show that women not only spoke and prayed in Yiddish, but they also wrote in this language for at least a few centuries.

KAROLINA SZYMANIAK: In addition, they were also patrons. However, it must be emphasized that the creators of Yiddish literature were primarily men who created—at least in theory and assumptions—for women. Writing in Yiddish was treated very purely for a long time, although there were also translations of the scriptures and texts devoted to them too. For example, Tsene rene, written in the 16th century, was a feminine Bible, written by Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi from Janów Lubelski. This is an adaptation of the biblical text, organized according to the rhythm of weekly readings in the synagogue, supplemented with materials, including midrashim and many other sources, repeated many times and popular today too.

ZOFIA ZALESKA: How did you choose the authors and poems for the anthology?

KAROLINA SZYMANIAK: Through the course of many conversations and negotiations. From the very beginning the anthology project was a bit anarchistic—we did not assume that it would present the history of Yiddish literature from God’s times from the 16th to the 21st centuries. Most of the authors in this collection are poets living and publishing in the 20th century, which brought a wave of women’s poetry. These are authors from various parts of the Jewish diaspora, from the United States, from Poland, from Israel, and from Russia. We do not present their work in chronological order, we have

the old texts intertwined with new ones, we compare them together so that, for example, Geli’s text won’t be a part of the section with ancient literature, which the reader quickly skims and moves on.

The anthology My Wild Goat has three editors; each of us has a different sensitivity, different needs and fascinations. We have known each other for a very long time, we have different life experiences, we are of different ages, we value our work, and we accept our differences. I think that it all serves the anthology and enriches it. There were times, working on the book, that we disagreed with each other, we argued about a poem, translation, or author. The concept of the book has continued to evolve, and we made decisions based on many factors. At different stages of our work, the support of our reviewers, Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Agnieszka Gajewska, as well as friends and acquaintances, was also important to us. Over the years, we have presented translations during public readings and other events

However, it must

be emphasized

that the creators of

Yiddish literature

were primarily men

who created—at

least in theory and

assumptions—for

women.


in order to try them out, to hear how these translations sounded and how the audience reacted to them.

ZOFIA ZALESKA: You have placed the poetry of fifty authors in seventeen thematic areas [such as]: “Genealogy,” “Prayers,” “Home and homelessness,” “Circles of love, circles of strangeness,” “Parents,” “Engagement”…

KAROLINA SZYMANIAK: Such an arrangement allows us to show the thematic diversity of Yiddish literature—it cannot be enclosed in drawers with the inscription “shtetl literature,” “Holocaust literature,” or “traditional literature.” In the anthology, we play with expectations toward Jewish poetry, which is why in the sections titled “In the circle of Torah and tradition” and “Prayers” we deliberately put texts that are against readers’ expectations. You have to remember that we arranged and published this collection in a certain context. We operate in the sphere of Polish culture, in which Yiddish literature has its own distinctive place. In the United

States, where individual books of poetry by many of these authors have already been published, the anthology would have been different.

We try to show Polish readers the richness of this literature … The thematic layout also allows us to emphasize the specificity of the female experience of the world, very diverse in itself. We point out the “universal topics, which perhaps, if not for women’s sensitivity, would not come to the fore,” as Debora Vogel once wrote. It was very important for us not to be an anthology for Yiddishists and specialists in the subject, of which we have quite a lot in Poland. We wanted to attract primarily people in Poland who are still reading poetry. If, however, someone would like to follow, for example, only the poems of Rokhl H. Korn, Anna Margolin, Kadia Molodowsky or Rejzl Żychlińska, they need only turn to the index, where we’ve listed the anthology’s poems organized by author. n

For a related article please see the review of Kol Ishe: The Voice of Women in

Yiddish Poetry, on page 21 of this issue. The complete version of this interview was originally published, in Polish, in Dwutygodnik: https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/8300-jestem-kobieta.html. This excerpt has been reprinted with permission.

Zofia Zaleska is a writer based in Warsaw.

https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/8300-jestem-kobieta.html


More than two months have passed since the

winner of the competition for directorship of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was announced. On May 10, 2019, Professor Dariusz Stola, the immediate past director of POLIN Museum, won the competition. Eleven out of the fifteen members of the competition jury, which was headed by Deputy Minister of Culture Jarosław Sellin, voted for Professor Stola. Three people voted for the other candidate, Monika Krawczyk, Chair of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, and one person abstained. The final step in the procedure was for the Minister of Culture and National Heritage to approve the nomination, but he has remained evasive or silent on the matter.

Dariusz Stola is a historian, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the author of numerous scholarly works on 20th-century Polish history. He was appointed Director of the POLIN Museum on March 1, 2014, for a five-year term, with the option to

extend the contract. Under his management, the museum opened its core exhibition and has won international recognition for its architectural design, institutional excellence, educational programs, and temporary exhibitions. In the last year alone, the museum was visited by more than 670,000 people, half of them from abroad.

Professor Stola’s contract ran through the end of February 2019. Two of the three founders of POLIN Museum—the City of Warsaw and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland—supported his continuing in his role as director and opted to extend his contract. However, the

Minister of Culture and National Heritage did not agree to renew Stola’s contract due to his criticisms of some government policies, including the amendment to the Institute of National Remembrance Act, which criminalized statements claiming that the Polish state and nation are responsible for the Holocaust, and that these issues were raised in the context of the opening of the museum’s exhibition Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath, on the fiftieth anniversary of the historical events.

On July 15, a petition began to circulate in Poland appealing to the culture minister to approve the nomination of Professor Stola. Within twenty-four hours, 3,087 signatures were collected via the Internet. The goal is to reach 5,000 signatures. Readers can visit the link at: https://secure.avaaz.org/pl/community_petitions/Pan_Minister_Kultury_i_Dziedzictwa_Narodowego_Profesor_Piotr_Gli_Apel_w_sprawie_mianowania_profesora_Dariusza_Stoli_na_dyrektora_Muzeum_POLIN.

Gazeta will continue to report on the matter as new developments occur. n

REPORTS

POLIN Museum Awaits the Return of its Director, Professor Dariusz Stola

Reported by Gazeta Editorial Team

Professor Dariusz Stola. Photograph by Magda Starowieyska. Courtesy of the POLIN Museum.

https://secure.avaaz.org/pl/community_petitions/Pan_Minister_Kultury_i_Dziedzictwa_Narodowego_Profesor_Piotr_Gli_Apel_w_sprawie_mianowania_profesora_Dariusza_Stoli_na_dyrektora_Muzeum_POLIN


Jewish Cemetery in Tarnów Rededicated, Restored, and Vandalized

Jewish Cemetery in Tarnów Rededicated and Restored

Editor’s Note: This text was excerpted and modified from a Jewish Heritage in Poland press release announcing the event and dated June 17.

T he rededication of the Tarnów Jewish cemetery

took place on Wednesday, June 26, 2019. Speakers included Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich; Chief Bishop of Poland for Catholic-Jewish Dialogue Rafał Markowski; Israeli Ambassador to Poland Anna Azari; Committee for Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Tarnów Chairman Adam Bartosz; Mayor of Tarnów Roman Ciepela; Tarnów descendant Elizabeth Szancer; and Friends of Jewish Heritage in Poland President Dr. Dan Oren.

Cemetery restorations reinforce historical memory by perpetuating the tangible record, not only of deaths, but of the lives of those interred

in the cemetery over hundreds of years. Further, they provide existing Jewish communities in those places in Europe with a physical anchor (along with others, especially synagogues) marking their rootedness in the place in which they still live.

Jews had lived in Tarnów for about 500 years prior to World War II, and, numbering about 25,000, comprised about half of the town’s total population. Today there are fewer than a handful of known Jews living in the town of over 100,000 inhabitants. Its major Jewish cemetery was severely devastated by German actions during the war, followed by vandalism and neglect after the war. Yet thousands of tombstones survived to this day.

Adam Bartosz, a Catholic Pole and retired director of the Regional Museum in Tarnów, took it upon himself to preserve the history of the Jews of Tarnów and to care for and build interest in restoring this once great cemetery. He formed an all-volunteer Committee for Preservation of Jewish

Heritage in Tarnów in 1988 and has led this project for the past thirty years. Bartosz is a 2019 Irena Sendler awardee and was honored by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture on the evening following the rededication ceremony. (See page 29 in this issue.)

In 2017, Bartosz’s committee received a substantial 3:1 matching grant from the European Union to support major restoration work at the Tarnów Jewish cemetery. That grant is providing 2.4 million złoty (over $600,000) to match the committee’s raising 800,000 złoty (about $200,000). The seed funds were provided by individual and organizational donors including the Małopolska Polish regional government, the Polish Ministry of Culture, and the Tarnów mayor’s office.

A US public charity, the Friends of Jewish Heritage in Poland, actively partnered with a Tarnów Jewish descendants’ group led by Dr. Jill Leibman and Elizabeth Szancer, among others, to help


the local Tarnów committee raise the needed funds to qualify for the EU-sponsored matching grant. These include significant support from Ronald Lauder, along with the kindness of Bruce and Lori Gendelman of the Sidney Kohl Family Foundation. Donations of all sizes came in from supporters worldwide.

Stated Szancer: “The successful renovation of Tarnów’s historic Jewish cemetery is a testament to the cooperation and collaboration of Jew and non-Jew, just as Jews and Poles lived there side by side in the past. As a descendant of Tarnów, I was very proud to work with Adam Bartosz, his committee, and many others to support this initiative. The memorial park, which Adam Bartosz envisioned, must be a living project, one to be continued and supported, not just for us, but for future generations. It should serve as a leading example of what can be accomplished.”

Restoration work on the Tarnów cemetery, done under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate of Poland, has included rebuilding the walls of the cemetery, installing sidewalks, cleaning away decades of brush and vegetation, restoring

many toppled and eroded tombstones and a Holocaust monument, converting the former Bet Taharah (funeral preparation room) into a mini-museum, and indexing thousands of tombstones in the cemetery to preserve those records online for access in posterity. The indexing project has already led to many descendants finding physical connections to their ancestors in the cemetery.

Newly Restored Jewish Cemetery in Tarnów Vandalized

Editor’s Note: This text was excerpted and modified from an article published online on Jewish Heritage Europe on July 21.

On July 21, just weeks after the Jewish cemetery

in Tarnów was rededicated, vandals spray-painted anti-Semitic graffiti on the newly repaired wall next to the entrance gate. It read: “Jews eat children. Jadowniki eats Jews.” (Jadowniki is a nearby village.)

Adam Bartosz and the Committee for Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Tarnów immediately organized a clean-up on Monday morning, July 22, in order to paint over the slogans. They released

a statement: “We believe that the majority of Tarnów residents, like us … oppose all forms of hooliganism, boorishness, anti-Semitism, or any discrimination and humiliation of other people, their origin, appearance, sex, age, etc. Let us show that in our city, there is no place for this type of acts of hooliganism.”

That same day, Bartosz wrote on Facebook: “It has not been a month since the official commitment to the renovation… I’m not counting on catching the perpetrator. I’m crying with shame. This act is what some people from my city did. From my homeland. This shameful act will be known around the whole world, entered from smartphones, Facebook, from the internet these images show the mentality of people of Tarnów, Poland. God, what a shame. And helplessness. I’m so tired. I think we should buy some paint and get to work. Wash away the shame that is not ours.”

Donations to help support the future maintenance of the Tarnów cemetery are welcomed at www.jewishheritagepoland.org/tarnoacutew. n

https://jewishheritagepoland.org/tarnoacutew.html


The Time Has Come: Change Kraków’s Jewish Communal Structure

Rabbis Eliezer Gurary and Avi Baumol

We, Rabbis Gurary and Baumol, the two

Orthodox rabbis serving the Kraków Jewish community, are working together toward building a stronger, brighter future for Jews, a legacy which has continued the great tradition of vibrant Yiddishkeit in Kraków for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, there is also an ugly side to Jewish Kraków, a secret everybody knows but nobody speaks about publicly. It concerns the official Jewish community—the Gmina Żydowska (Jewish Religious Congregation). For hundreds of years, Jews in foreign lands have chosen a body to represent them to the various governments. It is easier to work with one organization representing the Jews of the land than many different groups.

For many years, the job of the Gmina was to take care of Jewish matters such as the cemetery, the synagogues, and other Jewish needs—then came the Holocaust and communism during which the position of the Gmina

was minimized, due to lack of money and lack of Jews. For fifty years, the Gmina in Kraków served the interests of the dwindling Jewish community and assured there were hospital services for the ill and a proper Jewish burial.

For most of the last half of the 20th century, the Jewish Gmina of Kraków was poor, as there was no source of income other than donations. Then came 1989 and the end of communism and, shortly

after, the law of returning all public Jewish real estate to the Jewish community. This meant it was returned to the official Jewish Gmina. Almost overnight the Gmina became one of the richest Jewish institutions in Poland, with real estate worth tens of millions of dollars. With the gentrification of Kazimierz in the last thirty years, and with Jewish tourism soaring, each synagogue, apartment building, and storefront we assume has translated into

Masked security guards, hired by the Gmina, stand in the courtyard of the Izaak Synagogue on Monday, July 1. Photograph by Shlomi Shaked. Used with permission.


millions of dollars in possible revenue for the Jewish community.

Unfortunately, almost none of it has been publicly directed toward building Jewish life in Kraków. What happened to all the money? Where is the trail of tens of thousands of złoty from the multiple properties yielding rental revenue each month? The answer is, nobody knows. Why? Because for the last seventy years, one family has been in charge of the Jewish Gmina and nobody has access to the financial records of this community. The president of the Gmina has been in power for over twenty years, and his daughter is his vice president. They have a small tight-knit board of five members and don’t allow anyone from outside their circle to be involved.

In fact, while during the last five years Jewish life has grown, and more and more Jews have joined the community, the actual number of Jews who are members of the official Gmina has dropped! Once maintaining a list of 120 members, a scandalous act took place which reduced the number to under 100 members! Why limit the membership? To control the voting process, of course. If you control the votes you stay in power,

maintain hegemony, act with impunity, and keep getting richer while the rest of the Jewish community in Kraków struggles and relies on foreign donations to run essential programming.

Two years ago, most of the members started praying in the Izaak Synagogue instead of the Gmina’s official one. People were fed up with machloket; they simply wanted to pray in peace and they found that peace in Izaak. We, two rabbis from very different world views—Chabad and Modern Orthodox—have gotten along very well together over the past years and continue to work together.

Yes, we have been maligned, shut out, lied to, and verbally threatened by various members of the Jewish Gmina over the course of time, but

we have persevered because the mission of reviving Jewish life in Kraków far outweighs the personal pain. We probably would continue to maintain silence because it is never good when Jews air dirty laundry in public. We should be able to resolve our difficulties internally; we should be able to overcome malfeasance and root out evil. We should be able to democratically right the wrongs of Kraków’s Jewish Gmina through lobbying, voting, and influencing the future generations of members.

The problem is that when you control the votes, the members, and the money, for so many years, and when you hire people who are all too willing to hide secrets and participate in these shenanigans, then there is truly no hope for a resolution.

Rabbi Eliezer Gurary (on the left) of Chabad in Kraków leading the march in protest of the Izaak Synagogue being closed by the Gmina. Photograph by Adam Schorin. Used with permission.


It all has to stop. The Union of the Jewish Religious Congregations of Poland has the capacity in emergency situations to dissolve any individual Gmina. What better reason could there be to dissolve the Kraków Gmina than squandering of money, financial opacity, possible criminal activities, and threatening and bullying of Jewish tourists for decades?

We write this with a heavy heart and with full knowledge that a rocky road lies ahead, but we all have a responsibility to our community as well as to the world at large—a great responsibility to sanctify the name of God. One of the greatest sins is to desecrate that name through illicit actions and immoral, self-serving business dealings.

The time has come.

Kraków today has the potential of being one of the greatest stories of Jewish revivals and light in the Jewish world other than the miracle of the State of Israel. Unfortunately, it is marred by the unspoken corruption and controversy.

We are better than this! The Jewish world should stand with the Jews of Kraków and force the Union of Jewish Religious

Congregations of Poland to demand that the Gmina of Kraków open all of its books, subject itself to a financial audit, show transparency in their business and legal actions, and open the membership up to reflect the hundreds of Krakovian Jews who were prevented from joining, dismissed, or never showed any interest because of the futility that would be involved.

Let the process begin now. Let the upcoming new year not only bring us peace, health, and happiness, but also a renewed spirit for all of Kraków with a functioning Gmina who will care for all of

its Jewish members and help to reinvigorate Jewish life for all.

The time has come.

Signed,

Rabbi Avi Baumol Rabbi Eliezer Gurary

A version of this article originally appeared as a blog post on The Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/theres-a-problem-in-krakow-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-a-rental-disagreement. This excerpt has been reprinted with permission.

Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich and JCC Krakow Director Jonathan Ornstein climb over a fence to enter the locked and guarded Izaak Synagogue and retrieve congregants’ tefillin and siddurim. Photograph by Katarzyna Bednarczyk. Used with permission.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/theres-a-problem-in-krakow-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-a-rental-disagreement/


Anti-Semitic Event in Pruchnik Causes Alarm

Fay and Julian Bussgang

In certain Polish towns, it was a Good Friday tradition

since medieval times to create an effigy of Judas Iscariot, the disciple of Jesus who is historically blamed for having betrayed him. During the Good Friday ritual, it was customary to ceremoniously beat and then burn this effigy as punishment for having caused the death of Jesus. However, the Polish Catholic church had forbidden such demonstrations, reinforced by John Paul II, the Polish-born Pope, and such practices had all but discontinued until now.

This year, on April 29, such an incident was brutally recreated in the southeastern town of Pruchnik (population 3,800). In this local demonstration, a straw-filled replica of Judas was instead made to look like a stereotypical Hasidic Jew, with sidelocks, dressed in a black coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Many local children participated alongside the adults in beating the effigy with sticks, decapitating

it, then then burning it and throwing it in the river.

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has called the event “an atrocious revival of medieval anti-Semitism.” Many other groups expressed outrage at the revival of this ancient anti-Semitic custom. Poland’s Catholic Church likewise condemned the incident.

Bishop Rafał Markowski, chairman of the Council for Religious Dialogue and chairman of the Committee

The Judas effigy hanging in Pruchnik. Photograph by Janusz Kochanowicz. Taken from Facebook.

District prosecutor Agnieszka Kaczorowska, after watching the Good Friday ceremony in Pruchnik online, decided that it potentially contained elements of hate speech and may have constituted a crime under Polish law, which forbids inciting hatred on the grounds of national, ethnic, racial, or religious differences.


for Dialogue with Judaism, Conference of the Polish Episcopate, declared that “the Church expressly disapproves of such practices that violate human dignity.” Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński called the ritual “idiotic” and “pseudo-religious.”

The mayor of Pruchnik, Wacław Szkoła, expressed his regrets and stated that no municipal official gave permission for such an event to take place and that it was extremely irresponsible that children were involved. Mr. Szkoła vowed that the authorities would make efforts to ensure that there is no repeat of such a ceremony.

District prosecutor Agnieszka Kaczorowska, after watching the Good Friday ceremony in Pruchnik online, decided that it potentially contained elements of hate speech and may have constituted a crime under Polish law, which forbids inciting hatred on the grounds of national, ethnic, racial, or religious differences. Her office in the district town, Jarosław, has launched an investigation. Kaczorowska said the investigation would take at least two months and would initially focus on determining the identity of those who took part.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated, “We regret the anti-Semitic incident in the village of Pruchnik during the festival of Easter but are encouraged by the firm reaction by the Polish church authorities and senior officials in Poland’s government.” n

Fay and Julian Bussgang edited Gazeta for years. Today they serve as Contributing Editors.

Pruchnik residents beat the effigy of Judas. Photograph taken from Twitter.


Reflections of a Lucky Jew

I first performed as the Lucky Jew the day after

the hanging, beating, and burning of the Judas effigy in Pruchnik.

Lucky Jew is a performance initially conceived by Michael Rubenfeld and developed with Magda Koralewska Rubenfeld and Jason Francisco for FestivALT, an independent Jewish arts collective of which we are all co-directors. The piece was created in response to the tradition in Poland—not ubiquitous, but common enough that it’s recognizable—of buying and selling images of Jews with coins for good luck. Figurines of Jews have been sold in Poland for over 100 years alongside those of other Polish archetypes like Highlanders, priests, and peasants, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that they started appearing with coins. For many during communism, these images were symbols of the promise of capitalism. Since 2000, the images have become much more popular and are primarily bought for good luck—in particular,

financial luck. While many people, especially Jewish visitors to Poland, immediately perceive these objects as obviously hurtful and connected to the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews being greedy and money-grubbing, most people who make the objects do so with good intentions. Some talk about the Lucky Jews as remembrances of Poland’s pre-war Jewish communities and praise what they see as a Jewish capacity for good business. (Cultural anthropologist Dr. Erica Lehrer

has made a website based on her research of the objects: www.luckyjews.com.)

In the Lucky Jew performance, a Jewish man, dressed in the old-fashioned outfit of the Jews with coins, sells images of himself. In the most recent versions of the performance, the objects come with little stickers explaining they were made as part of an investigation into this cultural practice. For a long time, I had mixed feelings about the performance. On the one hand, I thought it was a funny

Adam Schorin

Adam Schorin as the Lucky Jew. Photograph by Katarzyna Bednarczyk. Used with permission.


and clever re-appropriation of a problematic practice. On other hand, I’ve wondered if the performance makes fun of people buying the images in an unfair way and perpetuates the stereotype it aims to critique, or otherwise gives permission to others to continue buying and selling them—what is the good of satire if its message is lost on its primary audience?

I became the Lucky Jew at Emaus, the annual Easter market where, traditionally, Krakovians can buy a Lucky Jew to bring them luck in the coming year. I called out in Polish: “A real Jew brings real luck,” and “We’re selling luck here,” and “Join me for a conversation,” and “Have

you ever seen a real Jew before?” I had all manner of interactions. Early in the day, one person praised me for the piece, saying “I love what you’re doing—Poland is changing.” A couple of older people stopped and told me about the Jewish friends they

had had growing up, before they left Poland following the anti-Semitic campaigns of 1956 or 1968. A group of young people from near my grandmother’s hometown in eastern Poland purchased four large canvases with my face on them, one of which they asked me to dedicate to their town. I had lots of conversations about the origins of these objects, different perspectives on them, the notion of “positive stereotypes,” and the complicated nature of luck.

Many people stopped to take photos of me, and these were moments when I felt like I didn’t have control over how I was being seen, or how people were engaging

Traditional “Jews with coins” sold at the Emaus Easter market in Kraków. Photograph by Adam Schorin. Used with permission.

It was intensely enjoyable to be able to give this imagined Jew a voice, to straddle the fictional image people anticipated when approaching my stand, and the real person that they’re meeting.


with me. So I started to give people permission for photographs only if I could take a photograph of them in return. This became a strange sort of exchange, photo for photo, posing for one another, but doing it allowed me to take back some kind of status.

The thing that feels worst to me about Lucky Jews—not the performance, but the actual objects—is that it makes me feel like a caricature, a cartoon, something that doesn’t actually exist. Of the six of us who have performed as the Lucky Jew, four of us have been white men from North America—we’re familiar with objects that turn identities into costumes and reduce people to caricatures and legends of the past, but we’ve rarely if ever been the target of that erasure. Speaking about the Chief Wahoo logo of the Cleveland Indians, activist Robert Roche has said, “Children see this cartoon character and they think we’re not even here anymore.”

I was thinking about this sentiment while performing the Lucky Jew, when I learned about the events in Pruchnik and saw the video of children standing around the Judas

effigy—Judas depicted as a 19th-century Hasid with a bright red nose—taking turns to beat it. Something that wasn’t on the top of my mind at the start of the day, but which grew apparent by the end was how thrilling, how empowering it was, to take this thing, this little caricature and make it into a real person. It was intensely enjoyable to give this stereotype, this imagined Jew, a voice, to straddle the fictional image people anticipated when approaching my stand and the real person that they’re meeting.

There is another aspect of the performance that I hadn’t expected. Most of the people

who purchased images of me talked about how they were doing it because it was a tradition—they were open to the idea of receiving luck, but they didn’t actually believe in it. Some, however, did—they told me they needed luck, financial luck, romantic luck, all kinds of luck. One man asked me to draw cartoons for his children on the back of each canvas he bought. And I found myself genuinely wanting to bring my customers luck, truly hoping the messages of “All the best!” and “For luck!” that I signed on each object would come true. As the day went on, I put more effort into these little messages, wondering what would happen to my wishes, where my face would end up, and what luck it could possibly bring. n

For more about the Lucky Jew performance and FestivALT, you can listen to an interview with Adam Schorin and Michael Rubenfeld on NPR: https://www.wbez.org/shows/worldview/festivalt-examines-jewish-culture-in-contemporary-poland/68f478b8-a2ad-4c19-8f03-67b7d7846e87.

Adam Schorin is Assistant Editor of Gazeta.

One man asked me to draw cartoons for his children on the back of each canvas he bought. And I found myself genuinely wanting to bring my customers luck, truly hoping the messages of “All the best!” and “For luck!” that I signed on each object would come true.

https://www.wbez.org/shows/worldview/festivalt-examines-jewishculture-in-contemporarypoland/68f478b8-a2ad-4c19-8f03-67b7d7846e87


A remarkable history of women’s poetry

in Yiddish was recently published by Joanna Lisek, a scholar of Polish literature. The book is available only in its native Polish, but it is imperative that it be translated into English as well.

The monograph, Kol Ishe: The Voice of Women in Yiddish Poetry, details the little-researched field of women’s poetry in Yiddish from the 16th century until 1939. It is probably one of the most beautiful examples of bookmaking in recent memory, inviting comparison with Efrat Gal-Ed’s recent German language biography of Itzik Manger. In English there is, simply put, no research available on this level.

The book pursues two aims. For a general Polish readership, it introduces an important aspect of Jewish cultural history, told with the perspective of contemporary feminist theory. For academic readers proficient in Yiddish, the book provides a distinctive approach to Yiddish poetry by

women. A particular strength of the book is the richness of its newly discovered archival materials and documents.

The first part of the book examines the general status of

women in traditional Eastern European Jewish society. The first examples of women’s voices that Lisek examines are handwritten verses that women left in the margins of Jewish religious books. Through those lines we learn the authors’ names and certain details of their lives. Another source of women’s poetry is through folklore; there the authors have remained anonymous.

The first recognized female poets in Yiddish appeared at the end of the 19th century. Rosa Goldstein (b. 1870) had her poems published in the Saint Petersburg Yiddish newspaper Yidishes folks-blat in 1888, an event that Lisek writes “opened a new era in the Yiddish poetry of women.” This was a time of national awakening among Jews in general, and Yiddish literature was in search of new paths. Following Goldstein, the voices of women found a distinctive, if modest, place in this national choir. Lisek is particularly interested in the feminist motifs and themes in the poetry of this women’s contingent, and focuses on

ANNOUNCEMENTS BooksKol Ishe: The Voice of Women in Yiddish PoetryBy Joanna Lisek

Reviewed by Mikhail Krutikov

A particular strength of the book is the richness of its newly discovered archival materials and documents...In English there is, simply put, no research available on this level.

Kol Ishe: The Voice of Women in Yiddish Poetry by Joanna Lisek.


them in the works of poets like Goldstein, Zelda Knizhnik, Pearl Prilutski, and Yehudis, whose given name was Rokhl Bernstein, all of whom first appeared at the turn of the 20th century.

The apex of Yiddish women’s poetry occurred between the two world wars. As Lisek notes, the Yiddish literary centers in this era were in the Polish cities of Warsaw, Łόdź, and Lvov (now Lviv); the United States and the Soviet Union were secondary. Individual poems by female poets received attention in the broader cultural context of that time, but those poets tended to not be recognized for their full body of work. Lisek acquaints the reader with contemporary critical exchanges vis-à-vis the issue of women in literature, which permits us to get a sense of the era. In doing so, she relies particularly on Ezra Korman’s 1928 anthology Yidishe dikhterins (Female Poets in Yiddish), which she employs both as a source for poems and information and subjects of critical scrutiny.

The cultural and historical context Lisek provides in her book allows us to better understand and appreciate the work of certain women poets who later left Poland and earned their reputation in America or Israel, such as

Kadia Molodowsky or Rikudah Potash. Aside from these and other well-known names, like Miriam Ulinover, Rokhl Korn, and Anna Margolin, we learn here of two unique poets who remain largely unknown today: Bertha Kling, an American poet, and Khane Levin, from the Soviet Union. Lisek has discovered important archival sources that help explain the internal poetic development of these two women, who lived in very different social circumstances.

In her conclusion, Lisek formulates three theoretical models for Yiddish poetry written by women. First is the progressive, feminist-oriented artist who dispenses with Jewish society’s traditional patriarchal foundations, but

doesn’t disavow the cultural legacy of her mother and grandmother. Poets in this category include Molodowsky, Rokhl Verpinski, and Celia Dropkin. The second model is the so-called New Rachel, a religiously observant woman who takes pride in her Jewish identity and expresses her poetic voice through it, like Rosa Yakubovitsh and Miriam Ulinover. The third type is the new socialist, who envisions herself as the equal of men in the struggle for a new society. This type includes the Soviet authors Levin and Aniute Piatigorsky.

In short, Kol Ishe is necessary reading for anyone serious about studying Yiddish literary history. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before this important book is translated into English, and hence made available to a much wider audience. n

This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts, translated from the Yiddish by Marc Caplan. Reprinted with permission from The Forward.

For a related article, please see “On Yiddish Poetry, Language, and ‘the Female Experience of the World’: Zofia Zaleska Interviews Karolina Szymaniak” on the New Anthology, My Wild Goat on page 7 of this issue.

The first recognized female poets in Yiddish appeared at the end of the 19th century. Rosa Goldstein (b. 1870) had her poems published in the Saint Petersburg Yiddish newspaper Yidishes folksblat in 1888, an event that Lisek writes “opened a new era in the Yiddish poetry of women.”


T he recently published book The Volunteer, by

Jack Fairweather (Harper Collins Publishers, 2019), with the subtitle One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz, recounts the amazing story of Polish resistance fighter Captain Witold Pilecki.

Pilecki, a cavalry officer who had fought in the Polish army against the Soviets in 1919–20, was involved in the Polish underground during World War II. In order to report on what was taking place in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, Pilecki volunteered to infiltrate and report back to the Allied leadership. While in Auschwitz, he managed to smuggle out detailed reports about the gas chambers, the selection process, the sterilization experiments, and crematoria. Unfortunately, the Office of Strategic Services in London, which received the reports, did not accept them as credible.

After two and a half years in Auschwitz as a Polish prisoner, he miraculously escaped and continued to take

part in resistance activities, including the 1944 Warsaw uprising. During the final days of the uprising, he was captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp. Upon being released from the camp in 1945, he went to Italy and, sometime later, went back to Poland. Upon his return to Poland, he was apprehended by the communist authorities, sentenced to death for having spied for the Polish Government-in-Exile, and summarily executed in May 1948. After the fall of

communism, Pilecki was posthumously rehabilitated and awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest order awarded to both civilians and military personnel.

The story of Pilecki, suppressed by Poland’s communist government for many years, is not well known. In 2012, Aquila Polonica published Pilecki’s own account of the time he spent in Auschwitz, written in 1945, entitled The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. The American public was introduced to this account in January 2013, when publisher Terry Tegnazian and historian Timothy Snyder of Yale participated in a panel discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Also, in early 2013, the Pilecki book was featured at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The new Fairweather book, based on access to hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, adds more context about Pilecki’s life and experiences. n

The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz By Jack Fairweather. HarperCollins, 2019

Reviewed by Fay and Julian Bussgang

The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz by Jack Fairweather.


ANNOUNCEMENTS Conferences Poland and the Jews at the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center

On May 2, 2019, the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center at Baruch College, CUNY, organized its annual conference—this year on the theme Poland and the Jews.

The conference description posted by Baruch College

of the City University of New York (CUNY) summarizes the theme and intent of the conference: “In 2018, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law legislation that makes it a crime—punishable by fines or prison—to attribute responsibility for or complicity during the Holocaust to the Polish nation or state. This law adds another layer of complexity to Polish-Jewish history—a history stretching back over 1,000 years. Poland and the Jews [was] a day-long event featuring a series of panels and cultural events that consider the intertwined and fractured relations between the two communities.”

Panels addressed the larger theme from several perspectives: Public Memory and Public Jewry; The Jews and the Politics of Culture; Beyond Auschwitz: Reflections

on the Holocaust. An all-star panel of scholars participated in the event, including Tom Freudenheim (museum consultant, writer, director emeritus of the Jüdishes Museum Berlin); Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (New York University and POLIN Museum); Erica Lehrer (Concordia University); Adam Zucker (documentary filmmaker); Karen Auerbach (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill); Jack Jacobs (CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College); Alyssa Quint (YIVO); Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto); Natalia Aleksiun (Touro College Graduate

School of Jewish Studies); Rachel Brenner (University of Wisconsin); Samuel Kassow (Trinity College); and David Schizer (CEO of the JDC, former dean of Columbia Law School). Art Spiegelman, contributor to The New Yorker magazine and well-known American graphic novelist (best known for Maus), was keynote speaker.

The Alexander String Quartet capped the conference with Mozart’s String Quartet No. 16 in E flat major, K. 428, Penderecki’s String Quartet No. 3, “Leaves of an Unwritten Diary,” and Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96, “American.” n

Four Jewish students posing with a non-Jewish friend at the State Gymnasium in Chełm, Poland, 1934. Courtesy of the YIVO Digital Archive.


Conference Devoted to Lithuanian-Jewish Writer Grigory Kanovich

On June 12, 2019, a conference devoted

to the life and works of the Lithuanian-Jewish writer Grigory Kanovich was held at the New London Synagogue. It commemorated both his ninetieth birthday and the publication of Devilspel, the second of his books translated into English. The conference was organized by the publisher Noir Press and the educational charity Spiro Ark, and was supported by the Lithuanian Jewish Council and Grigory’s son, Sergey Kanovich. In attendance were Lithuanian Ambassador Renatas Norkus and his wife.

Grigory Kanovich was born in 1929 into a Jewish family in Jonava, Lithuania. His childhood, which he describes in Shtetl Love Song (his first work translated into English), was traditionally Jewish and largely happy. This changed violently in 1941 when the Nazis invaded Lithuania, and that event is the basis of Devilspel. He and his family fled Lithuania through Latvia to the Soviet Union and

spent the war as refugees in Kazakhstan.

Kanovich returned to Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius, in 1945 and has since devoted much of his life to documenting, in a series of novels and stage plays, the instabilities and insecurities of life in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe over the past two centuries. He has also written nearly twenty stage plays and a number of screenplays. However, it is his novels, written in Russian, which have attracted most critical praise outside his own country. Two of them—Smile Upon Us, Lord and A Kid For Two Pennies—were turned into award-winning stage plays, presented in the UK, the US, and Canada. A third, Tears and Prayers of Fools, will soon appear in English.

The evening took the form of a symposium with participants Faina Kukliansky, Chairman of the Jewish Community of Lithuania and a former chairman of the Jewish community of Vilnius; Antony Polonsky, Chief Historian of

POLIN Museum; Dr. Kristina Sabaliauskaitè, who is one of Lithuania’s foremost novelists and historians; and Max Easterman of the European Literature Network. Among the topics discussed were Kanovich’s literary career, his relationship to Soviet power and censorship, Jewish life in pre-war Lithuania, as well as the problems that Lithuania has faced in recent years coming to terms with its role in the Holocaust. Although he chose not to address the audience and speakers, Kanovich was present on Skype throughout the evening from his home in Israel, where he has lived since 1993. For all those in attendance, it is very much hoped that this event will make the work of this outstanding writer more widely known. n

Antony Polonsky, PhD, is Chief Historian of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Antony Polonsky


Conference of the Polish Association for Yiddish Studies

The second interdisciplin-ary conference of the

Polish Association for Yiddish Studies (PAYS), Studies on Yiddish Language and Culture in Poland—Transformation, Challenges, and Perspectives, was held in Warsaw on May 12-13, at POLIN Museum. The meeting convened Yiddish representatives from Polish, German, Israeli, and American research centers, together with the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw, which helped in the preparation of the conference.

The organizing committee focused on diversity. Eight thematic panels featured linguists, literary scholars, and historians.

The conference was opened with a lecture by Prof. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, who summarized the last ten years of Polish Yiddish studies. It was a time of developing research into the Yiddish language and culture in Poland. Apart from monographs, many anthologies and translations were also made available.

The research results reflect a positive sign that the next ten years may also be fruitful, especially as the thematic scope of Yiddish research in Poland continues to expand. The conference speeches concerned Slavic expressions used in Yiddish, cultural institutions, social history, and popular culture.

After the conference, there was an open-to-the-public meeting regarding three large popular anthologies of Yiddish literature. On the first day, at the general assembly of PAYS, the new board was elected, headed by Dr. hab. Joanna Lisek. The board set the priorities for the next three years. In addition to the planned Friedman Seminars and the next conference, there are also plans to publish a post-conference volume and another large anthology. Taking into account the development of Yiddish research centers in Poland, other initiatives can also be expected, all of which will contribute significantly to the development of worldwide Yiddish studies. n

For more information, please contact [email protected]

Adam Stepnowski is a PhD Candidate in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław.

Adam Stepnowski


Adam Stepnowski

The exhibition Expressions of Freedom: Bunt and

Jung Idysz—The Exhibition that Never Was… opened on June 12 at the Museum of the City of Łódź. The exhibition commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Jewish avant-garde collective Jung Idysz in Łódź.

Founded in the first year after Poland regained its independence, Jung Idysz aimed to forge a new model of national art inspired by folk and Hasidic traditions. The group’s work was

influenced by contemporary artistic trends like futurism, cubism, and expressionism. Members of Jung Idysz lived in Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Dresden, but the group always maintained strong ties with Polish artists.

By the end of 1919, the group had published six editions of the literary-artistic journal Jung Idysz, which contained the work of, among others, Łódź’s Moshe Broderson, Marek Szwarc, Jankiel Adler, Pola Lindenfeld, and Ida Brauner, as well as artists

from other cities, such as Uri Cwi Grinberg, M. Nadir, and I. Sztern. The last page of its final publication of 1919 advertised a joint show featuring work by Jung Idysz and the Poznań-based artistic collective Bunt.

Although that exhibition was never realized, Expressions of Freedom has fulfilled the promise of 100 years ago and brought together work from both groups. Drawn from the collections of the National Museum in Poznań, the Museum of the City of Łódź,

ANNOUNCEMENTS Exhibition

Expressions of Freedom at the Museum of the City of Łodz

The exhibition Expressions of Freedom at the Museum of the City of Łódź. Photograph by Bożena Szafrańska. Used with permission.


the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and several other institutions and private collectors, the exhibition contains about one hundred original drawings, paintings, photographs, bas-reliefs, and posters created between the 1910s and the late 1940s. The artworks are supplemented by thorough notes and documentation, as well as the complex biographies of the artists.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extraordinary reprint of three original Jung Idysz publications, translated for the first time into Polish and English. On June 12 and 13, a

conference on Jung Idysz and the Jewish artistic avant-garde of the inter-war period was held at the museum.

The exhibition will be on display until September 29, 2019. n

Source: Museum of the City of Łόdź

For more information in Polish, please visit: https://muzeum-lodz.pl/wystawy_czasowe/ekspresje-wolnosci-bunt-i-jung-idysz-wystawa-ktorej-nie-bylo/.

Poster for the exhibition Expressions of Freedom at the Museum of the City of Łódź.

Founded in the first year

after Poland regained

its independence,

Jung Idysz aimed to

forge a new model of

national art inspired

by folk and Hasidic

traditions. The group’s

work was influenced

by contemporary

artistic trends like

futurism, cubism, and

expressionism.

https://muzeum-lodz.pl/wystawy_czasowe/ekspresje-wolnosci-bunt-i-jung-idysz-wystawa-ktorej-nie-bylo/


ANNOUNCEMENTS AWARDS AND UPDATES

2019 Irena Sendler Award Recipients

Taube Philanthropies has named Catholic

intellectual Zuzanna Radzik and ethnographer and museologist Adam Bartosz as the 2019 recipients of the Irena Sendler Memorial Award. Zuzanna Radzik is a public intellectual and activist, honored for her research, writing, teaching, and advocacy on issues such as Catholic-Jewish relations and Catholicism and feminism. For the past fifteen years she has been a member of the executive board of the Forum for Dialogue, the largest and oldest Polish non-governmental organization fostering Polish-Jewish relations. Adam Bartosz founded the Committee for Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Tarnów thirty years ago. From 1980 to 2012, he was director of the District Museum in Tarnów and in 1982 he organized the first post-war war exhibition dedicated to Jews outside of the Jewish Historical Institute. In 2011, he received the

Officer’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for actions to protect, preserve, and develop the cultural identity of national and ethnic minorities, particularly Jews and Romas.

The Irena Sendler Memorial Award was presented at a ceremony in Krakόw on June

26, in the Tempel Synagogue, prior to a concert of the Jewish Culture Festival. n

For more information go to: www.taubephilanthropies.org.

2019 Irena Sendler Memorial Award recipients Zuzanna Radzik and Adam Bartosz. Photograph by Michał Ramus. Used with permission.


POLIN Museum to Host Azrieli Prizes for Jewish Music

On September 15, POLIN Museum of the History

of Polish Jews will host performances of works by Avner Dorman and Kelly-Marie Murphy that were recognized in 2018 by the Azrieli Foundation.

Founded in 2014, the Azrieli Foundation awards two prizes for excellence in Jewish music: the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music is awarded to a composer who has written the best new major work of Jewish music; the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music is given to the composer who creates a work that most creatively and skillfully answers the question, What is Jewish music? The 2018 winners of the prizes are, respectively, Avner Dorman and Kelly-Marie Murphy. Their winning compositions will be performed by the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra, accompanied by soloists from Canada: violinist Lara St. John, soprano Sharon Azrieli, and the COULOIR duo. n

Azrieli Prize-winning composer Avner Dorman (center) in rehearsal with Yoav Talmi and Lara St. John. Courtesy of the Azrieli Foundation.


GEOP Distinguished Lecture Series—new lectures onlineFive new lectures in the GEOP Distinguished Lecture Series are now online.

Prof. Lisa Appignesi, a prize-winning writer, cultural commentator, and chair of the Royal Society of Literature, discusses “Daily Madness: On Mourning, Rage and Psychoanalysis.” Dr. Stephan Stach presents “Minority Rights: How Did the Second Polish Republic Cope with Them?” Prof. Cecile E. Kuznitz, Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, delivers “Modernity: The YIVO Institute and Modern Jewish Culture in Interwar Poland.” Prof. Bożena Shallcross from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Chicago speaks about “Jankiel’s Concert: Romantic Performativity and Jewish Agency.” Prof. Rudolf Klein from Szent Istvan University presents “Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries in Central and Eastern Europe.”

All lectures are available at: https://www.polin.pl/en/geop-distinguished-lecture-series.

Save the dates for GEOP conferences in September and December

International academic conference Jews against Nazi Germany during World War II, September 19-20, 2019

The conference, marking the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, will provide an opportunity to discuss the Jewish contribution in the fight against Nazi Germany and the Jewish resistance to the Nazi extermination policy. The papers will raise questions of both armed and civilian struggle. These include the contribution of Jewish soldiers of regular Allied armies, of members of the armed Jewish underground organizations, of Jewish fighters in various partisan groups, as well as individual acts of defiance. The conference will reflect on the questions: What was the Jewish resistance? What was unique in the Jewish resistance? Was

fighting in regular armies also a form of resistance?

This conference is organized jointly by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Centre for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

International academic conference Biographies and Politics. The Involvement of Jews and the People of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland, December 1-2, 2019

The aim of the conference is to outline the actual involvement of Jews and people of Jewish origin in the leftist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries from the perspective of individual motivations, ideological choices, and personal biographies.

To explore the different paths which led Jewish individuals to engage in leftist parties and organizations, the organizers

Global Education Outreach Program (GEOP) and POLIN Museum Announcements and Opportunities


suggest approaching the topic from a biographical perspective. Scholars from various disciplines will present their findings on the formation of Jewish political identities based on biographical sources, especially first-person narratives like diaries, letters, memoirs, or oral testimonies.

The conference is jointly organized by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and University College London. The conference is made possible thanks to the support of the European Association for Jewish Studies.

Details on the GEOP conferences are available at: https://www.polin.pl/en/geop-conferences.

Interdisciplinary Research Workshops at POLIN MuseumPOLIN Museum hosted two GEOP Interdisciplinary Research Workshops:Building Culture and Community: Jewish Architecture and Urbanism in Poland, May 2019

The workshop explored the role of the built landscape in creating, reflecting, and problematizing Polish-Jewish identity. Among the key questions the organizers addressed were: What building types and patterns of settlement did Jews create in the lands that were controlled by Poland at different points in history? How did Jews seek to assert their presence through architecture, and what can architecture tell us about the interactions of Jews and non-Jews? How is the Jewish character of a space represented in various texts and how have museum and memorial practices sought to reflect the rupture of the Holocaust? Employing various disciplinary lenses (including history, literature, art history, and anthropology) and scales (ranging from the individual structure to the neighborhood, shtetl, and city), the workshop’s participants considered how and by whom Jewish architecture has been produced, used, represented, and remembered.

The workshop was organized by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; the Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the University of Michigan, and the University of Wrocław.

The Jewish Inn: From Architecture to Phantasm, June 2019

The workshop focused on the cultural institution of the Jewish tavern, its past, and present. The critical evaluation covered such themes as the typology and materiality of the inn as a specimen of vernacular architecture; the inn’s image in literature and other arts; the inn as a site of social interactions and the meeting ground for diverse social, ethnic, and religious groups; the inn as site of political and illegal activities; the inn as conduit for introducing Jewish cuisine and music to the wider society.

The workshop was organized by the University of Chicago and the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw.

In 2019, POLIN Museum will host two more workshops.

Details are available at: https://www.polin.pl/en/research-collections-research-global-education-outreach-program/call-for-applications-research-workshops.

https://www.polin.pl/en/geop-conferences

https://www.polin.pl/en/research-collections-research-global-education-outreach-program/call-for-applications-research-workshops


GEOP Research Fellowships for Doctoral and Post-Doctoral CandidatesTwo GEOP Fellows, Dr. Stephan Stach and Dr. John Mackenzie Pierce, finished their fellowships at POLIN Museum and the Jewish Historical Institute.

Dr. Stephan Stach worked on the project “Ringelblum’s Trustees. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (1947–1989) and the Emergence of Shoah Memory during the Cold War.” Dr. Stach is a historian who worked at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research project focuses on the role of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for the construction of Holocaust memory during the Cold War. His research interests cover Polish-Jewish relations in the 20th century, national minorities in Eastern Europe, and the history of East-Central European dissent.

Dr. John Mackenzie Pierce worked on the project “Life and Death for Music: A Generation’s Journey across War and Reconstruction, 1926–1953.” He received his

Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University, where his research examined the aftermath of World War II in Polish and Polish-Jewish musical culture.

Dr. Pierce has published in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, and Słuch Absolutny, the first edited volume devoted to the composer Roman Palester. His research has also led to collaborations with musicians and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. A highlight of this work was the scholarship and performance festival Forbidden Songs, which featured six US premieres of works by Palester and the re-premiere of the 1947 film Zakazane Piosenki (Forbidden Songs) with new English subtitles. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Kosciuszko Foundation, and the Beinecke Foundation.

Details on the GEOP Fellows are available at: https://www.polin.pl/en/research-collections-research-global-education-outreach-program/current-fellows. n

https://www.polin.pl/en/research-collections-research-global-education-outreach-program/current-fellows


ANNOUNCEMENTS Events

75th Anniversary Commemoration Marks Liquidation of the Łodz Ghetto

The city and the Jewish community of Łódź will

host a weeklong conference beginning August 25 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto. When the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, they changed the name of Łódź to Litzmannstadt and established a Jewish ghetto, the second largest in Poland during the war. During its existence from 1939 to 1944 the ghetto was a home and prison to more than 200,000 Jews. The anniversary commemoration of the ghetto’s liquidation is organized by the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź (www.centrumdialogu.com).

Participants of the commemoration will gather at the Jewish cemetery in Łódź on August 29 for the lighting of candles and then march to the Radegast Station memorial, which marks the departure point for the thousands of Jews who were transported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated beginning on August 9, 1944.

The week of events will offer a full program of speakers, films, exhibits, and concerts as well as the unveiling of new monuments at Survivors Park. One of the highlights will be “We Long for a Home,” a concert at the Edelman Dialogue Center inspired by the music played between 1945 and 1949 by musicians who survived the Łódź Ghetto and established The Happy Boys ensemble. n

See page 37 to learn more about the Happy Boys. For more information about the commemorative events, please visit https://www.centrumdialogu.com/en/commemoration-program.

https://www.centrumdialogu.com/en/commemoration-program


Memoir Buried Rivers to be Presented at 75th Anniversary Commemoration in Łodz

Like most offspring of Holocaust survivors,

author Ellen Korman Mains grew up with a historical and personal burden. In 2006, feeling called to reconcile those horrific events with human goodness, she began traveling to Poland and to her mother’s city of Łódź. Her memoir, Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey Into the Holocaust (Westlake Books, 2018), chronicles seven journeys and incorporates the testimony of her uncle—an Auschwitz and Łódź Ghetto survivor—to reclaim a lost family history against the backdrop of contemporary Poland.

August 29 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liquidation of the Łódź Ghetto. As part of the week of commemoration events, the author will present her book at the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź on August 27 at 4:30 p.m. More info at: https://ellenkormanmains.com/. n

Winner of: 2018 Silver Nautilus Book Award

2019 Bronze Independent Publisher Book Award

2019 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist

Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey Into the Holocaust by Ellen Korman Mains.

https://ellenkormanmains.com/


Jewish Festival in Łodz During Shavuot

The city of Łódź in June hosted its first ever Jewish

heritage festival. Held during Shavuot, the Festival of Tranquility drew participants to the city center where they enjoyed films, Torah study sessions, a concert, and workshops in calligraphy and cooking. The event was organized by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland and Rabbi Dawid Szychowski, of the Shavei Israel group from Israel, which assists descendants of Jews to return to Judaism.

Łódź had one of Poland’s largest Jewish communities before the Holocaust. After World War II the communist government discouraged public expressions of Judaism in Łódź and throughout Poland, but that changed dramatically after 1989. “Judaism has witnessed a revival in Poland since the downfall of communism,” declared Michael Freund, the founder of Shavei Israel, “and we are happy that we can celebrate it.” n

A participant in the Festival of Tranquility shows off the matzah she has made. Image from the festival’s Facebook page.

A workshop for children at the Festival of Tranquility. Image from the festival’s Facebook page.


The Name’s Bajgelman — World Premiere at the Jewish Culture Festival

Ola Bilińska and the musicians from the Libelid project pay a musical tribute to the Bajgelman family, which significantly influenced the musical landscape of pre-war Łódź.

O n June 27, 2019, a riveting concert by Ola Bilińska

and Libelid at the Jewish Culture Festival was devoted to the pre-World War II music of Dawid and Chaim (later Henry) Bajgelman, the two most prominent members of the Łódź-based musical clan.

Dawid Bajgelman was an extremely versatile musician: a violinist and violist, a conductor, composer, and songwriter. He conducted the Łódź Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra of the Jewish Itzhak Zandberg Theatre. He composed music for many theatres all over Poland and conducted their orchestras; he recorded albums for Syrena-Electro, but became famous as the author of the music for the theatrical performance of The Dybbuk by S. Anski, which was an international hit. During the war, he founded and conducted a forty-four-member symphony orchestra in the Łódź Ghetto.

Poster for The Name’s Bajgelman. Courtesy of the Jewish Culture Festival.


Chaim Bajgelman was a violinist, saxophonist, and composer and the only one out of nine musical siblings to survive the war. He played professionally since the age of fifteen. He was a member of the family band, The Jolly Boys, which he revived in post-war Germany under the name The Happy Boys, playing jazz concerts for American soldiers and Jewish survivors. After the war, he emigrated to New York, where he continued his musical activities with The Happy Boys.

Ola Bilińska and her band have arranged the songs of both brothers to suit the 21st century: pre-war songs, lullabies, and fragments of theatre music now include the sampler, analogue synthesizers, and electronic vocal effects. In the foreground, however, are the

beloved instruments of both brothers: the violin and viola, played by Zulia Ziętek, known for her collaboration with alternative scene musicians such as Maciej Cieślak (Ścianka), Monika Brodka, and Mitch and Mitch. The group was supplemented by a cello and the harp. Bilińska and her ensemble performed the works of the Bajgelman brothers in a modern, slightly romantic, acoustic-electronic adaptation.

The concert was held at the Galicia Jewish Museum and co-sponsored by Taube Philanthropies, which recognized Bilińska with its Irena Sendler Award in 2018, and hosted her and Libelid in performances of their Yiddish compositions in San Francisco and Berkeley in December 2018. The June 27 concert honored

Henry Bajgelman’s daughter Riva Berelson and a family member, in attendance from the Bay Area, where Berelson heard Bilińska perform and invited her to help bring her family’s musical legacy to new audiences starting with the Jewish Culture Festival concert. Berelson, a businesswoman active in her Jewish community, is collecting her family’s music and life stories to preserve and present their legacy.

The Musicians: Ola Bilińska, Edyta Czerniewicz, Kasia Kolbowska, Julia Ziętek, Sebastian Witkowski. n

Excerpted with permission from the Jewish Culture Festival program.

Director of the Galicia Jewish Museum Jakub Nowakowski honors Riva Berelson. Photograph by Ada Kopeć-Pawlikowska. Used with permission.

Group portrait of the members of The Happy Boys swing and jazz band that performed at DP camps throughout Germany, 1945-49. Many had been musicians in the Łódź Ghetto. Pictured from left to right are: Sam Spaismacher, Henry Eisenman, Abraham Mutzman, Chaim (Henry) Bajgelman, Elek Silberstein, Itchak Lewin, Abraham Lewin, and Josel Lewin. Photograph courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Henry Bajgelman.


Third Edition of FestivALT Focuses on Women and Agency

This past June in Krakόw marked the third edition of FestivALT, an independent arts festival that

operates at the intersection of the fractious and promising Jewish cultural revival in Poland and in Europe as a whole, bringing “wit, humor, and a bit of chutzpah to the complexities of contemporary Jewish Poland. With its past unreconciled to its present, Jewish renewal in Krakόw is caught between the legacies of the Holocaust and communist repression, as well as the current tides of tourism and gentrification,” states FestivALT’s 2019 program message. Among its offerings in theater, visual art, site-specific performance, activist intervention, and community conversation, this summer’s program focused on the theme of women and agency throughout history. With several projects—including Michelle Levy and Patrycja Dołowy’s ongoing investigation into the story of one woman’s life, a sculptural installation by Stephania Freda Leigh addressing legacies of sexual violence during the Holocaust, a short play by Noemi Berkowitz about a Jewish woman forging a new queer family, a landmark exhibition of the work of pioneering Polish-Jewish photographer Amalia Krieger, and several evenings of lectures and performances hosted by burlesque artist Betty Q—FestivALT addressed this theme in compelling, diverse, and unexpected ways. Additionally, Gazeta’s Assistant Editor, Adam Schorin, is one of the five co-directors of FestivALT, and he reflects on his experience performing in FestivALT’s performance piece Lucky Jew, in this issue of Gazeta. (See page 18.) For more information on FestivALT, this year’s program, and events happening throughout the year, visit www.festivalt.com. n

The poster for FestivALT 2019. Set and photography by Richard Tuschman. Graphic design by Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska. Used with permission.


The Sixth Annual Ride For The Living — Stronger and Bigger Than Ever

Over 250 people—members of Krakόw’s local

community along with friends and supporters from around the world—came together to cycle sixty miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the JCC Krakow in the heart of Kazimierz as part of the JCC’s sixth annual Ride for the Living. Together, participants commemorated Poland’s Jewish past and tragic losses in the Holocaust, while also recognizing its hope-filled present and future. Following the ride, which ended hours before the start of Shabbat, the JCC hosted a 750-person Shabbat dinner, perhaps the largest-ever in post-WWII Krakόw. n

The Ride’s lead marshal, Edyta Gawron, an associate professor of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University, leads the cyclists to the finish line at JCC Krakow. Photograph by Jakub Włodek. Used with permission.


Teachers in Oswiecim Learn about Anti-Semitism

A new cohort of twenty- four local teachers

has completed an intensive semester-long course titled the Academy of Anti-Discrimination Education, held at the Auschwitz Jewish Center (AJC) in Oświęcim. According to AJC Director Tomasz Kuncewicz, “the academy’s aim is to equip teachers with knowledge and tools to address the rise of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and other types of hatred and to help create and sustain classrooms free of prejudice.”

Teachers of the humanities from primary and high schools from all over Oświęcim county come together each month for weekend sessions to study past and present manifestations of hatred, as well as practical applications of that knowledge for classroom context.

In recent sessions, participants heard presentations from Poland’s leading academic

experts on anti-Semitism and social psychology. During the study trip to Warsaw they visited POLIN Museum and toured the area of the Warsaw Ghetto as well as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

During the academy, each teacher prepared and implemented a classroom project about discrimination. This fall, graduates of the project will travel to Germany for a study tour of memorial sites dedicated to the Holocaust and World War II,

as well as meetings with non-governmental organizations focused on this history and human rights.

The Academy of Anti-Discrimination Education was made possible with the generous support of the EVZ Foundation under the framework program “Facing Antisemitism and Antigypsyism.” n

Maciek Zabierowski is Education and Program Specialist at the Auschwitz Jewish Center.

Maciek Zabierowski

Participants in the Academy of Anti-Discrimination Education at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw. Courtesy of Maciek Zabierowski.


A Memorial Park is planned at the site of the Great

Synagogue in Oświęcim, the town mostly known by its German name: Auschwitz. The unveiling of the park will coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the destruction of the Great Synagogue by the Germans at the beginning of World War II. The park is scheduled to open in November 2019.

The Great Synagogue, built in neo-Moorish style, was the central Jewish house of worship in Oświęcim before the Holocaust. Currently, the site holds a simple, worn plaque containing basic historical information. It is regularly visited by youth, primarily from Germany, the UK, and Poland, as part of educational guided tours dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust.

The Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, through its creation of the Memorial Park, will combine commemoration and reflection through art installations and historical education. The Memorial Park is co-funded by institutional and private donors from Poland and beyond, including funds from descendants of Holocaust survivors from Oświęcim,

ANNOUNCEMENTS

The Great Synagogue Memorial Park in Oswiecim

Maciek Zabierowski

The planned memorial site of the Great Synagogue in Oświęcim. Courtesy of Maciek Zabierowski.


The site of the Great Synagogue in Oświęcim as it looks today. Courtesy of Maciek Zabierowski.

the Memorial Foundation for the Victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and an international crowdfunding campaign. The donors will be listed near the entrance to the park. n

If you are interested in contributing to the Great Synagogue in Oświęcim (Auschwitz), please contact us at [email protected].

Auschwitz Jewish Center Fact Guide:n The Auschwitz Jewish

Center (AJC) is the only Jewish presence in the town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz).

n The AJC includes the Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue, the sole surviving Jewish house of worship in Oświęcim, as well as the Jewish Museum and the Kluger Family House.

n Through educational programs the AJC teaches about the 400 years of Jewish presence in Oświęcim and the modern-day dangers of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

n The AJC is an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City. n


S ome one hundred members of the Jewish

community of Warsaw joined more than 47,000 marchers in the city’s annual Equality March on June 8. Marching together, Jewish participants carried Jewish Pride flags, the Israeli flag, and a rainbow kippah. The parade held particular significance, given the heated national debates over issues such as gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay persons—measures that the ruling Law and Justice Party opposes.

This year’s Equality March also marked the first time that the mayor of Warsaw joined the event.

Emil Jeżowski, organizer of the Jewish section of the parade, noted the broad public participation in the parade, which was attended by people “of varying degrees of religious observance,” including many friends of the Jewish LGBT community. “I am glad that the response was so big and the atmosphere was family-like,” he said. n

A participant in the Equality March in Warsaw. Photograph by Krzysztof Bielawski. Used with permission.

PHOTO ESSAY

Jews March in Warsaw Pride Parade

Emil Jeżowski, organizer of the Jewish section of the Equality March, wearing a rainbow kippah. Photograph by Natalia Czarkowska. Used with permission.


The Jewish bloc of the Equality March walking past the Palace of Culture and Science. Photograph by Krzysztof Bielawski. Used with permission.

[email protected] www.taubephilanthropies.org

If you would like to suggest an article or author for the next issue of Gazeta, or submit one yourself, please email: [email protected]. The submission deadline for the next issue is September 30, 2019.We accept queries and submissions for feature articles of no more than 1500 words, and up to 500 words or less for all other announcements or reports.

Group portrait of the members of The Happy Boys swing and jazz band that performed at DP camps throughout Germany, 1945-49. Many had been musicians in the Łódź Ghetto. Pictured from left to right are: Sam Spaismacher, Henry Eisenman, Abraham Mutzman, Chaim (Henry) Bajgelman, Elek Silberstein, Itchak Lewin, Abraham Lewin, and Josel Lewin. Photograph courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Henry Bajgelman.

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